The General Steps In Outsourcing
You need an organized approach for both types of outsourcing—technical and political. These types are surfaced here because the introduction has been paved with the preceding discussion. A technical vendor is one that will perform specific business or technical work, independent of politics. A political vendor is someone that you require to do business in the specific location. So there are many combinations of these two. You can, for example, have many political vendors and only one or two technical vendors. A political vendor is usually limited to a specific country.
The steps in outsourcing are shown in Fig. 8.1. In the first step, you want to identify what can be outsourced. You will have to be creative in an international project since you have to include political factors. You should consider hiring one consultant to determine what you need in political outsourcing. Then you would hire another, different vendor for the political work. This sounds weird to people academically, but in the real world you are dealing with a culture about which you have limited knowledge. The National Geographic or the Discovery Channel don’t help much here—this is the seamy world of politics in a locale strange to you. Get used to it!
Assessing the risks and benefits forces you to determine in more detail what the vendors will do. You have to weigh what would happen if you didn’t have a vendor, remembering that in many cases you have no choice.
The third step is to determine what is to be outsourced. In the first step you have defined the potential scope and then you analyzed it in the second step.
Preparing for outsourcing can mean getting the organization ready to accept the outsourcing firm. If the employees and managers are not used to international projects, then they will likely question having some of the vendors. You should mount an education campaign to inform them of the alternative of doing it themselves. Here it is useful to highlight a few language and cultural issues. This will bring them down to earth rather quickly from experience.